VT’s Music Chat

[mjmooney]

14 minutes ago, bickster said:

I.m no hater of PF, I have a copy of pretty much everything up to The Wall (apart from maybe relics.) 

I have the expanded bootleg version of Relics. It's good, worth acquiring. 

Discogs

[Mark Albrighton]

I used to work with a bloke who was adamant that The Final Cut is their best album.

Takes all sorts, I suppose.

[Xann]

Everyone had stuff like Floyd, Beatles, Stones and the Doors back in the day. Never an og, always taped.

Never really felt the urge to pick any of them up since.

Did pick up a DSOTM though. A junk shop in Fulham had put a fresh box of LPs outside. Wouldn't usually have looked, but as I was walking by it started to rain and I felt a bit sorry for them. Bought a Ramsey Lewis, Aretha Franklin live, a 'record' from the MIT (got home and found it was a laserdisc) and a DSOTM for 50p a go.

https://www.discogs.com/sell/release/23582948?ev=rb

The vinyl is EX and it has both posters.

[VILLAMARV]

2 hours ago, bickster said:

I.m no hater of PF, I have a copy of pretty much everything up to The Wall (apart from maybe relics.) 

Easy Stars All Stars I can take or leave tbh, it's ok but it's a bit too cartoony for my liking

 

Its ok, I meant that welsh nationalist and that panda guy

[VILLAMARV]

I find Syd Barrettt era a bit much personally, and I agree with the sentiment of everything up until half of The Wall, but for my sins, I do very much love the Division Bell. Meddle is and always will be my favourite.

[Mark Albrighton]

2 hours ago, VILLAMARV said:

I find Syd Barrettt era a bit much personally, and I agree with the sentiment of everything up until half of The Wall, but for my sins, I do very much love the Division Bell. Meddle is and always will be my favourite.

When I was a kid, my dad regularly played Dark Side and The Division Bell in the car so for a long time in my mind the two albums were synonymous with each other despite their obvious differences. At the time I felt like “Well, these two albums have the same merit and the one presumably just follows the other.”

High Hopes is still a good tune though.

[VILLAMARV]

Agreed on High Hopes. Coming Back To Life is a bit special. What Do You Want From Me and Keep Talking are great aswell.

Gilmour's guitar does weird things to me. The only other guitarist I put in the same category is Stevie Ray Vaughan. There is something in the construction or the tone or something when those two play the guitar into my head that makes me kinda understand our resident Barryite when he says music can take him to some weird place totally unaided by narcotics or booze or whatever.

 

[chrisp65]

3 hours ago, VILLAMARV said:

Its ok, I meant that welsh nationalist and that panda guy

Welsh Internationalist. 

 

Narrator: later that day, in a record shop, he chose to continue not buying Dark Side Of The Moon.

 

Edited October 13, 2023 by chrisp65

[Seat68]

This Pink Floyd chat will feel to some like the Tool day a couple of weeks ago. It too will pass. 

But for now all you people criticising The Wall it is an excellent album. Mother in particular beats anything they ever did. 

[Rugeley Villa]

A bloke who worked down our place many years ago, one of his favourite albums was The Division Bell .

[VILLAMARV]

It's a really uplifting album.

[Anthony]

Amused by this review of the new Madonna show/tour thing. Amused by what it doesn't say. 

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/madonna-ap-london-o2-arena-lourdes-leon-b2429936.html

Quote

Madonna played songs from across her vast career

 

[Rugeley Villa]

Listening to the joys of ABBA this crisp sunny Sunday morning. Can only describe them like having an ecstasy pill, you just love everything around you whilst listening to them , and the sounds are just so warming . 

[Rugeley Villa]

Lester Bangs Rolling Stone review of Black Sabbath debut 1970

Over across the tracks in the industrial side of Cream country lie unskilled laborers like Black Sabbath, which was hyped as a rockin’ ritual celebration of the Satanic mass or some such claptrap, something like England’s answer to Coven. Well, they’re not that bad, but that’s about all the credit you can give them. The whole album is a shuck — despite the murky songtitles and some inane lyrics that sound like Vanilla Fudge paying doggerel tribute to Aleister Crowley, the album has nothing to do with spiritualism, the occult, or anything much except stiff recitations of Cream clichés that sound like the musicians learned them out of a book, grinding on and on with dogged persistence. Vocals are sparse, most of the album being filled with plodding bass lines over which the lead guitar dribbles wooden Claptonisms from the master’s tiredest Cream days. They even have discordant jams with bass and guitar reeling like velocitized speedfreaks all over each other’s musical perimeters yet never quite finding synch — just like Cream! But worse.

[Xela]

Do love a bit of Pink Floyd, but only really listened to them properly about 10 years ago. 

1973-1979 my favourite era - Dark Side, Wish You Were Here, Animals and The Wall. I'd describe those albums as epic. 

@chrisp65 Time, on Dark Side, is (IMO) one of their greatest. 

[mjmooney]

19 minutes ago, Rugeley Villa said:

Lester Bangs Rolling Stone review of Black Sabbath debut 1970

Over across the tracks in the industrial side of Cream country lie unskilled laborers like Black Sabbath, which was hyped as a rockin’ ritual celebration of the Satanic mass or some such claptrap, something like England’s answer to Coven. Well, they’re not that bad, but that’s about all the credit you can give them. The whole album is a shuck — despite the murky songtitles and some inane lyrics that sound like Vanilla Fudge paying doggerel tribute to Aleister Crowley, the album has nothing to do with spiritualism, the occult, or anything much except stiff recitations of Cream clichés that sound like the musicians learned them out of a book, grinding on and on with dogged persistence. Vocals are sparse, most of the album being filled with plodding bass lines over which the lead guitar dribbles wooden Claptonisms from the master’s tiredest Cream days. They even have discordant jams with bass and guitar reeling like velocitized speedfreaks all over each other’s musical perimeters yet never quite finding synch — just like Cream! But worse.

Well, this obviously a bit OTT, but speaking as someone who's never really 'got' Sabbath, I find there is more than a grain of truth in it. 

[mjmooney]

And as a companion piece, here's John Mendelsohn's Rolling Stone review of Led Zeppelin's debut album: 

Quote

The popular formula in England in this, the aftermath era of such successful British bluesmen as Cream and John Mayall, seems to be: add, to an excellent guitarist who, since leaving the Yardbirds and/or Mayall, has become a minor musical deity, a competent rhythm section and pretty soul-belter who can do a good spade imitation. The latest of the British blues groups so conceived offers little that its twin, the Jeff Beck Group, didn’t say as well or better three months ago, and the excesses of the Beck group’s Truth album (most notably its self-indulgence and restrictedness), are fully in evidence on Led Zeppelin‘s debut album.

Jimmy Page, around whom the Zeppelin revolves, is, admittedly, an extraordinarily proficient blues guitarist and explorer of his instrument’s electronic capabilities. Unfortunately, he is also a very limited producer and a writer of weak, unimaginative songs, and the Zeppelin album suffers from his having both produced it and written most of it (alone or in combination with his accomplices in the group).

The album opens with lots of guitar/rhythm section exchanges (in the fashion of Beck’s “Shapes of Things” on “Good Times Bad Times,” which might have been ideal for a Yardbirds’ B-side. Here, as almost everywhere else on the album, it is Page’s guitar that provides most of the excitement. “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You” alternates between prissy Robert Plant‘s howled vocals fronting an acoustic guitar and driving choruses of the band running down a four-chord progression while John Bonham smashes his cymbals on every beat. The song is very dull in places (especially on the vocal passages), very redundant, and certainly not worth the six-and-a-half minutes the Zeppelin gives it.

Two much-overdone Willie Dixon blues standards fail to be revivified by being turned into showcases for Page and Plant. “You Shook Me” is the more interesting of the two — at the end of each line Plant’s echo-chambered voice drops into a small explosion of fuzz-tone guitar, with which it matches shrieks at the end.

The album’s most representative cut is “How Many More Times.” Here a jazzy introduction gives way to a driving (albeit monotonous) guitar-dominated background for Plant’s strained and unconvincing shouting (he may be as foppish as Rod Stewart, but he’s nowhere near so exciting, especially in the higher registers). A fine Page solo then leads the band into what sounds like a backwards version of the Page-composed “Beck’s Bolero,” hence to a little snatch of Albert King’s “The Hunter,” and finally to an avalanche of drums and shouting.
In their willingness to waste their considerable talent on unworthy material the Zeppelin has produced an album which is sadly reminiscent of Truth. Like the Beck group they are also perfectly willing to make themselves a two- (or, more accurately, one-a-half) man show. It would seem that, if they’re to help fill the void created by the demise of Cream, they will have to find a producer (and editor) and some material worthy of their collective attention.

Rolling Stone

I was FB friends with Mendelsohn for many years, but he unfriended me when I mildly criticised his rather cruel remarks on the death of Charlie Watts. 

[Rugeley Villa]

2 minutes ago, mjmooney said:

Well, this obviously a bit OTT, but speaking as someone who's never really 'got' Sabbath, I find there is more than a grain of truth in it. 

By the mid 70s sabbath were one of the bands Lester Bangs was listening to the most so he warmed to them eventually. It’s a pretty famous review. Like sabbath , zeppelin also got panned in reviews back then. 
 

Tony Iommi even recalled a person sent out to review their gig left early before the band went on and put out a terrible review of the gig on the local paper . Unbeknown to the person sabbath never actually went on that night and the gig was cancelled for whatever reason, so yeah bands like that were up against it especially against their elders . 

[Rugeley Villa]

6 minutes ago, mjmooney said:

And as a companion piece, here's John Mendelsohn's Rolling Stone review of Led Zeppelin's debut album: 

Rolling Stone

I was FB friends with Mendelsohn for many years, but he unfriended me when I mildly criticised his rather cruel remarks on the death of Charlie Watts. 

I was listening to zep yesterday whilst up the gym and noticed what most of us already knew that Jimmy Page is a genius in the studio. Such a good producer and really gave zeppelin an edge over their contemporaries regarding sound and vision as to how the music should sound. Unfortunately page needed Zeppelin for him to shine and did little post zeppelin that’s worthy of any merit. 

Edited October 15, 2023 by Rugeley Villa

[chrisp65]

44 minutes ago, Rugeley Villa said:

hyped celebration of the Satanic mass or some such claptrap,

grinding on and on with dogged persistence.

plodding bass lines

My dad and my brother were quite in to Sabbath.

But that was all I could hear.